1 Buying a Home in America About five and a half years ago, Integrated Schools podcast host Andrew Lefkowits was on the hunt for a family home in the Denver area. At the time, his kids weren’t old enough to be in school, but that didn’t mean that education didn’t play into the conversation. “We ended up buying our house in our current neighborhood for its very highly regarded school,” he told us. It wasn’t the school itself he was focused on; it was the school’s effect on home values. “I hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about education,” he told us. His final choice—down the street from the house he grew up in—ended up costing him an estimated $75,000 to $150,000 extra due to its zoning. “I thought, Great. That’s where my kids will go to school. It’s one less thing to worry about,” he told us. Before his kids were old enough to enroll, however, Lefkowits stumbled across an old VHS tape from his own elementary school’s talent show. Just as he remembered, the students were a reflection of his neighborhood at the time. The talent show, he says, “was this celebration of all of the various cultures that were in the school. It was a great insight into what I remember from elementary school. That’s the experience I wanted for my kids.” He started to research the “great school” his kids were zoned to. It touted high test scores, excellent arts programs, opportunities for extracurriculars. However, Lefkowits found that it notably lacked diversity. As with so many neighborhoods in Denver, rising costs of living had driven out families of color in the decades since Lefkowits had been in school. So he started to look into different schools in the area, but the experience was puzzling. “If you put in my ZIP code on GreatSchools, the school where my kids ended up transferring to—which is barely a mile from our house—doesn’t come up until the fourth page of results,” he says. The site showed him schools from another district before listing the school a few blocks away, which actually had the diversity Lefkowits was looking for. The school’s score on GreatSchools was 2 out of 10. However, Lefkowits doesn’t feel that this score represents his kids’ experience.
“Everything in the system pushes you to pick your house based on the schools, even if you don’t have kids. It’s tied to your property value anyway,” he says. “I felt like I knew enough about the neighborhood and the school to do that. But when I got here and started looking into it, I realized I didn’t actually have any sense of that at all.” The barriers Lefkowits faced in finding a diverse school for his kids point to greater problems in the U.S. housing industry. The housing market, from real estate agents to homebuyers, leans on school ratings to determine everything from housing prices to school fit. As Lefkowits’s experience shows, there are lots of ways to measure a strong school—and many have nothing to do with test scores.
The COVID-19 Home Buying Boom There are three main factors currently accelerating home buying in the U.S.: low interest rates, the need for more space, and a short supply of houses. Because of the pandemic, lots of new home construction was put on pause in the spring, creating increased demand for new housing. Who is buying homes? Many middle-class families with at least one parent working from home are starting their search. They’re looking for different reasons; some are interested in extra space, others are looking for a lower cost of living. However, these families commonly have a paycheck coming in to support the move. Most are white, college-educated, and employed in sectors largely unaffected by the pandemic. While some homeowners are upgrading to larger homes, the surge is fueled by first-time homebuyers. Millennials are moving into homeownership at a large scale. Even those areas which have been seeing an exodus of young people should continue to see young, employed millennials purchase homes. However, we also need to acknowledge the other side of the housing boom. The same economic conditions making home buying accessible for young, employed families is putting strain on those who have lost employment. If moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures are lifted, families may be on the hook for months worth of lost housing payments.
FALL 2020
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